Storage-by-the-box startup Boxbee Inc. has raised $2.3 million in a seed round led by Floodgate, according to Chief Executive and Founder Kristoph Matthews.

Other investors in the round include Google Ventures, 500 Startups, Techstars, Jason Calacanis and Ludlow Ventures. Earlier, the company raised $200,000 from angel investors including the AngelPad accelerator in San Francisco.

Boxbee picks up, ships and stores its customers’ stuff, charging $6 to $7.50 a month per box and giving customers access to data about what they’ve packed up and where it is, and allowing them to have specific items sent to new addresses using a unified Web app. The company offers bulk discounts to large customers.

While Boxbee’s app is mobile-optimized, the startup plans to create native apps for iOS and Android users in the near future, Mr. Matthews said.

Now operating in San Francisco and New York, the 13-employee startup will use some of its funding to scale domestically, while increasing its staff to about 30 full-time employees in the next year. It plans to add to its engineering, customer support, sales and marketing teams, as well as ground operations staff who handle customers’ boxes in warehouses.

The company is also testing a “library for stuff,” says Floodgate co-founding partner and Boxbee investor Ann Miura-Ko, a kind of “sharing economy” service. The library allows Boxbee customers to lend out items that are in storage, and “not useful to society there,” the CEO said.

The idea is that you can send an invitation or link to a friend who can then download your message, look at photos of stuff you’re offering to them on loan, and elect to have it shipped to their doorstep via Boxbee.

Ms. Miura-Ko is also an investor in sharing economy startups like Lyft and TaskRabbit, as well as the storage search venture SpareFoot, which helps people find the best deals on moving and self-storage services when and where they need them.

The Boxbee service lets users create a visual inventory of the stuff they’re sending to self-storage.

Boxbee.com

“Boxbee is a modern-day shipping, valet and storage service,” she said. “There’s a sort of ease-of-use to it, when it comes to pick-up and drop-offs, that makes it appealing to customers. But then there is the storage service which makes it very sticky as well.”

She expects Boxbee to use the funding to win over new prospective customers, and to continue to experiment with new app features and services that meet existing customers’ needs.

Boxbee started out as a consumer service that was immediately appealing to college students who move every summer, Mr. Matthews said, but more recently launched a business-focused valet service.

Boxbee works well for professionals involved in outside sales, events, or fashion and beauty who have to move a lot of physical goods around the world ten or 20 times a year, the CEO said.

In Spring 2013, Boxbee won a Best New Startup award at the LAUNCH conference. With that award spurring buzz on blogs, Mr. Matthews noticed several other tech startups and apps cropping up in the storage and logistics field. That was one reason he felt motivated to create new business lines like Boxbee’s library and business valet services, he said.

In the future, the CEO thinks that Boxbee could become a kind of recommendation engine–or “a Pandora for physical goods”–by using its aggregated data to understand what kind of stuff people put in storage, how often they want to use or move it, and then delivering them samples, targeted deals or advertising if they opt to receive them.

He also said Boxbee’s technology can be used by large enterprises as a kind of “central platform for managing, sending, and receiving…their physical stuff.”

Comments (1 of 1)

2.3 million, that's not bad for one round. I guess once this news got out, many new start up will appear in a short time

While the marketing is not as saturated as self storage, mobile storage operator like westore, Yes-Storage and clutter are still working hard to get more customer. The transportation cost is one of the biggest obstacle for these company to go to the next level

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